You're the British military. Defend Avalon from my PCs.

[domino]

Also, you should be able to find some helpful info on fortifications here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_obstacle

 

[RangerWickett]

The second large defenses would be at the Tor itself. A circular fence with barbed wire and limited entry points would reduce the threat of PCs tossing grenades inside the tower.

Here's a better view of the tower:

In the center of the Tor, faintly visible from another plane, is a stone basin in which the water must be poured. There will be a concrete cylinder placed around this (including a top), so someone can't just rush in and perform the ritual. It will take quite a while to smash through the concrete, giving reinforcements time to arrive.

I'm thinking a squad of a dozen 6th level soldiers in the tower itself (including two snipers on the tower), and likewise a dozen down in the Chalice Well garden. Eight emplacements around the hill will each have three guys - two handling the machine gun, one on look-out who also has a shoulder SAM launcher (such things do exist, right?).

Then there's the five person group of commandos who are ready to respond to any sort of threat. They'll be accompanied by the illusionist. I want to save the other mages for a fight that can take place inside Avalon itself.

 

[Quartz]

I'm considering using the "crash a plane into the hill" idea, so that the military will be there for clean-up.

This is good: you could use a Typhoon for this as one pancaked in Spain a year or so ago (the crew ejected and it fluttered down and landed flat). Lots of interesting avionics and stuff, all covered by the Official Secrets Act.

 

[Agback]

I'm considering using the "crash a plane into the hill" idea, so that the military will be there for clean-up.

Make the plane a nuclear-armed bomber, to help the military create a public flap, and justify such precautions as evacuating the town and erecting a cordon. I would be tempted to put some sort of nuctear emergency teams on all the approach roads, but I'm not sure that Briatin has such. I would put lots of infantry out to patrol the Levels, anyway. But with a plane-crash scenario you wouldn't get to issue them with live ammo or with orders to shoot or to call in mortar strikes. What you have to hope is that the PCs will shoot and kill a bunch of unarmed soldiers. When that happens you announce that terrorists are trying to steal the bombs off the plane, issue a terrorist alert, issue live ammo, etc.

The bad guys can't flagrantly mind-control because there is a sort of magical law enforcement group that might go after them, but mostly they don't need to use mind control anymore, since they had been subtlely befriending people over the long-term so that the friendship would last even after the spell ended.

That's sad. People being friendly won't issue suicidal orders such as ordering that multi-million pound bits of kit be crashed into hills.

Barbed wire and . . . what were those concrete barriers called? That's fine. It'll funnel the PCs in particular locations, which they'll no doubt try to avoid.

Field fortifications like that are much less effective at channelling infiltrators than they are at channelling assaults. I wouldn't count on them to have much effect.

Two snipers atop the Tor will be watching the approaches to the Chalice Well.

That isn't feasible. The Well is in a walled garden surrounded by other buildings: shops and so forth. There is lots of blocking cover all around it. And lines of sight from the top of the Tor are, as I recollect, close off by a belt of trees as well. You had better put a platoon of armoured infantry outside the garden and a patrol of SAS inside.

The hill itself will have two lines of trenches, along with barbed wire and mobile machine gun turrets.

Mobile machine-gun turrets? Use Warrior AIFVs. They give you a 30mm cannon, a 7.62mm chaingun, smokescreens. And you get four with each platoon of armoured infantry.

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Could your illusionist hide the hill, and perhaps create the illusion of another hill elsewhere- one that would be heavily guarded by the troops, thus fooling the PCs into thinking that is their real target, while the actual gateway is hidden right under their noses?

 

[Agback]

I'm thinking a squad of a dozen 6th level soldiers in the tower itself (including two snipers on the tower),

Bad idea. The interior of the tower is small and offers no concealment. It is a good place for mêlée combatants and a bad place to put people who depend on ranged weapons. Even its top is bad place to put snipers, because I am pretty sure that there would be a lot of dead ground on the slopes of the hill. Put snipers out in the town and on the Levels shooting in towards the slopes of the Tor. Note well that the tower is just a shell. Standing inside it at ground level and looking up, you see sky.

Also, the British Army doesn't do squads of a dozen. It does fireteams of four, sections of eight, and platoons of twenty-nine. (Or 31 if you attach a heavy machinegun team from the battalion fire-support company.)

An infantry fire-team consists of a junior NCO (lance-corporal or corporal) with an assault rifle, a gunner with a light machinegun, and two riflemen with assault rifles. Each rifleman and NCO carries two rifle grenades.

Each section consists of two fireteams, one lead by the section leader and one by the assistant section leader. A mechanised infantry section comes in a Spartan APC with a GPMG. An armoured infantry section comes in a Warrior AIFV with a chaingun and a 30mm cannon.

A platoon is three sections plus a headquarters vehicle of the same type, carrying the platoon commander, the platoon sergeant, the radio operator, and two mortarmen with a 51mm mortar, and (maybe) two gunners with a heavy machinegun.

and likewise a dozen down in the Chalice Well garden.

I would put at least a platoon in each place.

Eight emplacements around the hill will each have three guys - two handling the machine gun, one on look-out who also has a shoulder SAM launcher (such things do exist, right?).

Javelin missiles, yes. They aren't regular issue to infantry. So if you just send an infantry company (the quickest thing to do) they will arrive without them. 3rd Division has an artillery regiment armed with them (47th Regiment RA), with one battery at Colchester, one battery at Tidworth, and one at Catterick.

Then there's the five person group of commandos who are ready to respond to any sort of threat.

The British Army Commandos were disbanded in 1947, and have been replaced by the Parachute Regiment and the Special Air Service. Only the Royal Marines use the term 'commando' in teh British services now.

The blokes you want for this role are probably the SAS. They work in teams of four.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Also, the British Army doesn't do squads of a dozen. It does fireteams of four, sections of eight, and platoons of twenty-nine. (Or 31 if you attach a heavy machinegun team from the battalion fire-support company.)

An infantry fire-team consists of a junior NCO (lance-corporal or corporal) with an assault rifle, a gunner with a light machinegun, and two riflemen with assault rifles. Each rifleman and NCO carries two rifle grenades.

Each section consists of two fireteams, one lead by the section leader and one by the assistant section leader.

So if you assigned one section, with one fire team in support, wouldn't that make a dozen men?

-Hyp.

 

[Agback]

So if you assigned one section, with one fire team in support, wouldn't that make a dozen men?

Yes. But if a carbuncle were blue, it would be a sapphire. In other words, you wouldn't do it that way, or more to the point, the officers you sent wouldn't do it that way. Military efficiency depends on teamwork and established ways of doing things. You say to one man 'go', and he goeth, and he takes his unit with him and they do things the way they were trained. If you strengthen a British infantry platoon with a 'machinegun in the sustained fire role' it gest a two-man MG crew attached to the platoon HQ. If you give it an MG section it ends up with three rifle sections, one MG section, a mortar crew, a radio operator, a sergeant, and a subaltern. If the subaltern disperses the 3 MGs in his attached MG section among his infantry sections, he ends up with three reinforced sections of ten men, not two of twelve.

RangerWickett's suggested setup involved 48 infantry and a five-man commando team, with their fireteams and sections all chopped up. Reorganising things that way would waste time and interfere with teamwork. The military wouldn't do it that way. And if the magicians particularly wanted it done that way they would find it difficult to micromanage.

Operations research during WWII found that soldiers arbitrarily attached to 'primary teams', even replacements slotted in to vacancies in teams, were about half as effective as people in their own teams and suffered nearly four times the casualty rate. Good armies (and the British army is very good) keep people with their mates as much as possible. They'll send two SAS patrols rather than a patrol and a spare man. They'll put a fireteam of infantry to guard each gun crew or missile crew, not half a fireteam. They'll send two sections, not a section and a half. Unless, of course, urgent necessity drives.

Rather than send 48 men, the British Army would send two platoons. Or maybe a company. Why not? So lets have a company to defend Glastonbury, with a platoon in the town centre, a platoon at the Well, and another platoon on the Tor. Thrown in another two companies to close the roads and patrol the Levels. Why not send a whole battalion?

Now that I think about it, the plane crash idea is not a good one either. It is too complicated, and it takes too long.

The PCs' best bet against the army is to dash in as soon as possible, and get the thing done before the army has time to mobilise, arrive, and prepare. And the army's play against that is the old adage that 'a boy scout with a shanghai in the right place at teh right time is worth more than a brigade of artileery two hours late and thirty miles away'. The defenders have to get something, anything, into place as soon as possible. They should send a platoon of MPs on motorcycles right away, and a troop of SAS in a helo as quickly as possible. That will get them some men with Hocklers there in about half an hour, and a troop of nasty silent men within an hour and a half. A battalion of mechanised infantry can be there in, say, three or four hours.

To arrange a plane crash will take much longer. You have to start by arranging a flight, which would take hours at best. Arranging a crash would take longer, and indeed it is hard to imagine what sorts of friendship in Whitehall, the Air Ministry, and the RAF would be required to issue orders to crash millions upon millions of pounds worth of warplane into the outskirts of an English country town.

The bad guys move fast. They use their illusionist or other magicians to fake a terrorist outrage in Glastonbury. Their friends in Whitehall get on the blower to Major-General Lamb to secure the town right away, and to send a battalion to seal the place off as soon as possible. They also contact the lord lieutenant and the chief constable of Somerset for police and civil co-operation. Then they issue descriptions of the PCs. About the time the infantry are arriving in Glastonbury they send an order that a platoon secure the Tor and a platoon secure the Well, and send engineers to seal the Well and build a concrete box around the phantom in the Tower.

The officers sent along on this mission execute it using tried-and-true methods, delegating whole platoons, sections, and fireteams to perform tasks. Micromanagement, breaking up teams, reorganising structures, etc. would only waste time, sow confusion, and invite unintended consequences.

So you're going to end up with some sort of whole unit to defend the Tor. If you want to patrol the Levels, close the roads, provide anti-aircraft cover etc. that had better be a battalion. You are most likely to get mechanised infantry.

A battalion of mechanised infantry gets you 27 infantry rifle sections each with two light machinguns, 64 Saxon vehicles each with a turretted GP machinegun, 24 Milan anti-tank missiles in sections of two, 8 Scimitar reconnaisance AIFVs in a recce platoon, 9 81mm mortars in three sections of three crews, 9 heavy machineguns in three sections of three crews, and a hard-bitten lieutenant-colonel in charge who will not brook interference in his regiment. If you tell him to defend the Tor and the Well he will send a platoon to do each job, and maybe reinforce it with a machinegun section from his fire support company. Tell him to patrol the Levels in depth and he will send a company or two to do that. If you ask for anti-aircraft backup to be sent you will get a Javelin battery or troop from the divisional air defence regiment. The Army will not pluck men and their weapons out of their artillery regiment and try to integrate them with an infantry platoon, especially not in the confusion of an unplanned operation. It doesn't work that way, unless you

 

[Lazarous]

1. A guy who is fragile, but a fast talker. He's the one with access to the spell that will let them get into Avalon.
2. A woman who is an incredible, almost superheroic brawler.
3. A gunslinger who has great defenses so bullets can barely harm him.
4. A woman with powers similar to Magneto's, but weaker. She's practically impervious to metal attacks, but she can't stop hundreds of bullets or crush cars or anything.
5. An assassin with great speed and stealth, who supposedly can be killed in a single hit if you strike him with an unhallowed cross.
6. A psychic who can scry, see the future, and meddle with memories.
7. A D&D-style wizard, with a wide variety of spells.

The ones that stand out to me here as major threats are 2, 6, 7.

2 depends a lot on what you mean by 'superheroic brawler'. When i read that, i think superman. If superman is coming a'calling, just forget about using the military, they won't even slow him down. Do bullets present a threat to this character? What exactly does 'superheroic' entail here?

6 will be able to give early warning of any plan you wish to implement and be a major problem via infiltration of troops used to guard an area. Forget traps, forget small groups of heavily camoflauged units. They'll be isolated and picked off before they know what's happening. External snipers are similarly going to be the first target such a group will go for. Worse - the snipers could get their memory rewritten and become 'allies' of the infiltrators. You need overwhelming firepower, not finesse.

7 depends on what level mage you're talking about. a 5th level mage will be annoying but possible to deal with. a 17th level mage will destroy anything short of another 17th level mage you use to defend the area with. Do the badguys have an idea of what level spells this guy is capable of casting? (i.e. have they seen him use horrid wilting on someone?)

Moderate threats are 3, 4, 5.

3 and 4 combined soud like a very potent duo. 4 can effectively create a tank for 3 to shoot out of by picking up some metal plates and moving within them. Can 3 knock out missiles with his guns? Do the bad guys know what range 4 can use her powers to?

5 may be a problem from a command & control standpoint for any forces sent to defend an area - if he's sufficiently stealthy, he'll be able to pick off commanders, radio operators and the like until the unit is disorganized and blind. Do the bad guys have an idea of how stealthy he is relative to available tracking technology? (i.e. can he beat IR sensors?).


1 sounds like a nonthreat, someone that isn't going to be deployed against your defenses. He's mission critical to the players, so unlikely to be in the assault.

From your resources:

So, you're the badguys, trying to make sure a group of 7 people don't reach this one location. Your resources include the entire British military, but you can't use too many units because not everyone in the government is under your control. You also have three fairly powerful magic users -- one specializing in illusions and movement, one specializing in attack magic, and one who uses magic to create weapons and augment his fighting ability.

Can the illusion/movement mage confer his movement effects on others? I'm thinking teleportation and haste here, specifically. Further, are the military units you have available ok with having magic cast on them, and are they familiar with how to operate in such an environment? Are the illusions he can create capable of defeating scrying?

The attack magic mage seems the least overtly useful resource here, since you have an entire military to draw on for blowing stuff up. However, does the attack mage have an assortment of save-or-die effects? Keeping this fellow in some off-site location, and possibly teleporting him in once the group is fully engaged with other defenders might be a way to beat the precognition of the psion (or not, i'm not sure what level of power he has). If he has an assortment of save-or-die's, he can possibly take out the major threats, starting with the mage.

The last sounds like a cleric of some sort, or perhaps a psiwarrior. Depending on the brawlers immunity to bullets, he can offer a method to at least stall that character. Can he make himself immune to bullets?



Basically, I need a better idea of strong the players and the magic npc's are relative to the military that might be deployed before I can make any good suggestions.

 

[RangerWickett]

One quick comment because it's 12:30am here. I wanted a group of 12 because of the Knights of the Round Table/Apostles parallel. That can be dropped.

Ai. Lots of planning to do tomorrow. Stats to be made, maps to be sketched. This caught up with me much sooner than I thought it would, even though the campaign's been headed this way ultimately since the beginning, over a year ago.